Cathy's Art Diary

Lovely exhibition at Kew Gardens of contemporary botanical pictures from the Shirley Sherwood Collection. It defined exotica as interesting, usual plants seen in unfamiliar surroundings in this case interesting plants from the topics and of which grow at Kew. All the works were stunningly details and in beautiful colours. I loved this picture by Andre Demonte of cultivated ginger and humming birds. I missed the birds on my first look. I also liked Yee-Yean Suh’s edible fruit plant setting the stems against a big leaf giving and abstract feel to the work and Pauline Dean’s Jade Vine with delicate hanging purple and green flowers. Closes 27 October 2019

Fabulous exhibition at Kew Gardens of work by the glass artist Chihuly. Chihuly’s large scale pieces where shown around the gardens, hidden amongst the planting and inside various buildings and provided huge pops of colour. I am very fond of his wonderful glass sculptures and it was lovely to see them in a different context and out of doors. I wish I’d managed to go a few times to see the work in different lights. I think my favourite was the beautiful white installation in the water lily house with lily like white works shown on the water amongst the flowers so the reflections added to the work and it could be seen from all angles. I also loved the specially commissioned blue chandelier in the Temperate house. It was also lovely to see some of his drawings and smaller works in the art gallery there. There were tableaux of the work and a chance to get very close and see it’s intricacies in detail. Closes 27 October 2019

Thin exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of work by Elizabeth Peyton from the last ten years. The pictures in this show were quite small and were sparsely hung. They were largely based on photographs which gave them a detached feeling. I didn’t engage with them. I liked the idea of hanging some of them around the general collection and it was a nice way of getting people to look at the rest of the gallery but I didn’t always see the connection and sometimes the larger more ornate pictures just seemed to make them look smaller. I felt Queen Elizabeth I was looking down her nose at Kurt Cobain. Closes 5 January 2020 Reviews Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard

Stunning exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery of drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci from the Royal Collection. Leonardo made an kept thousands of drawings which were inherited by his favourite pupil, Francesco Melzi. They were then acquired by the sculptor, Pompeo Leoni, who mounted them in two albums. By 1660s one of these was owned by the Duke of Arundel and was given to Charles II. The drawings were arranged chronologically but with themed sections where they fit that chronology. They traced him moving between Florence and Milan and then on to France and covered artistic sketches as well as scientific ideas, anatomy and botanical studies and designs. My favourite sections brought together studies for well know paintings which had large reproductions of the pictures for comparison. This includes a lovely head of the St Bartholomew in the Last Super and the beautiful study of hands for the Lady with the Ermine. I think my favourite was the study for the head of Leda which sho...

Interesting exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall organised by Koestler Arts, the UK’s leading prison arts charity showing work by people in prison and on probation. This year’s show was curated by the jazz musician Soweto Kinch who has tried to highlight the depth of experience. The show was split into three sections Stained Glass Superman, Disco Dogs and That Was Then, This is Now but I’m not sure I understood the theming. There were paintings, sculpture, poetry and this year there were also examples of songs. I didn’t have time to listen to many of them but was very impressed by the production and content of the ones I did spend time with. The work showed how art can help people work through issues in their lives as well as creating a diversion in different times. Highlights this year included a top hat made of sculpted paper from books and magazines, a lovely portrait from HM Prison Warren Hill where the light came through small holes in the left hand of the pictur...

Charming exhibition at the Royal Academy of works by Dame Laura Knight from the Academy’s own collection. The works were given to the Royal Academy in the 1972 by Knight’s executors to mark that she was the first woman elected to membership in 1936. This show focused on nudes, the countryside and theatre and circus. I loved the simply draw pictures of dancers recording moments in their movement in a few lines. The show includes a sketchbook from 1919 from time she spent watching the Diaghilev company. The nudes section pointed out that she had not been allowed to paint from life as a woman during her training so she employed her own models. It was a nice touch to show this work with a portrait of Knight by her husband Harold Knight. Closes 2 February 2020

Beautiful exhibition at the Royal Academy on the life and work of the Swiss artist Félix Vallotton. I loved the rich colours of the painted works in this show which created an evocative view of Parisian life in 1900. I also liked his woodcuts which were taken up by the Liberal press and he became the principle illustrator for La Revue and the show included some lovely portraits of his colleagues there. His work took on a more domestic feel when he married the wealthy daughter of a Parisian art dealer and he stopped producing woodcuts. I loved his pictures of turn of the century interiors often featuring couples which made you mind start to build stories about them. My favourite picture was the one attached of a maid looking in a closet. I love the way the lamp highlights the white linens. I also loved a picture of a shop with a display of brightly coloured, wrapped soaps. Closed 29 September 2019 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

  Fascinating exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at the life and work of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck. Schjerbeck made an extraordinary artistic journey from an Impressionist style, via Cubism to an abstract expressionism. One friend described her as if Gwen John and been taught by Munch! To show this I’ve used two pictures from a wonderful room of self-portraits during which he face gradually dissolves and she takes a very honest view of aging. Some of the early works were delightful from Chicken Amongst Corn Stacks from 1887 through some lovely late Victorian style portraits painted with loose brush strokes. The last room was her post 1909 portraits which experimented with colour and tone alongside abstracted still lives which experimented with space and tone. Throughout the show I had a sense of her friendships and a life dominated by art. I was fascinated by a period when the Finnish Art Society commissioned her to travel to St Petersburg to ma...

Interesting installation at the Royal Academy by Graham Allard and Stephen Johnstone examining the Academy’s collection of plaster casts of architectural details. Once used as teaching aide these casts were hidden behind temporary studio walls after the architecture school closed in the 1960s. They were revealed as part of the recent refurbishment. Some of the casts were on the floor mounted on transport pallets which let you look down and closely at them. Unusually you see them   mounted high on the walls of the new wing. These were shown with various works showing people working with copies such as a watercolour made for a Sir John Soane lecture surveying a temple and photographs of an artist painting the cornice of a cast gallery in Edinburgh. The show examined the nature of copies and their role as well as the positive negative and also included a film of the casts being discovered and removed which switched between a positive and negative print to reflect the ...

Fabulous exhibition at the Royal Academy of work by Antony Gormley. I had expected this to be a retrospective but, although there was older work, there were lots of new pieces for this space or reworked for the space. I don’t want to say too much about the show because so much of it took me by surprise and I don’t want to spoil that for you. Of course there were Ormskirk like figures as shown here. In this case they appeared from all directions in a room and you walked among them so they became part of the crowd. I find Gormley’s ideas so simple and effective that you wonder why no-one has done there before. It was lovely to have a room of sketch books arranged roughly chronologically. They capture ideas and moments in his day. It’s amusing to see the quality of the books improve over the years as he becomes more successful. I found this show had a humanising effect on people. From it feeling quite busy when you first go in the crowd spreads out. I loved the li...

Fun installation   at the Royal Academy making use of busts from their own collection to explore portrait sculpture. Curated by artists Cathie Pilkington and Alison Wilding these are laid out in one room on unusual plinths such as breeze blocks and filing cabinets and graduated in height. All the pieces are either by or of Fellows of the Royal Academy and the show has info sheets to tell you who they are of and by. They give the effect of looking at a room of faces but also make you reflect on how sculpture has changed over the 250 years since the foundation of the RA. Closes 19 January 2020

Colourful exhibition at Palazzo Cini of new work by Adrian Ghenie inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Battle between Carnival and Lent”. These works were huge and painterly. They were full of abstracted figures with nods to current affairs and full of Venetian colour. They looked fantastic in this 16th century Palazzo which I wouldn’t have imagined. I loved the Francis Bacon like take on Donald Trump. Closes 18 November 2019

Interesting exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection looking at the art she collected after she moved to Venice in 1948. The first section looked at the 1848 Biennale where she took over the Greece Pavilion which was the first show of a modern art collection in post war Europe and her Jackson Pollock show at Museo Correr which was the first Pollock show in Europe. It was lovely that they had so many great Pollocks form the show here but the space was too small for such large pictures. From her early days in the Palazzo on the Grand Canal Peggy established the idea of exhibitions in the space with a show of 20 pieces of contemporary sculpture, a few of which were shown here along with archive material from the show. The show included work she bought from British artists including the dramatic Graham Sutherland shown here and a Bacon of a chimpanzee. There was also a fascinating room of kinetic and optical art works which really messed with your eyes. What was a...

Fascinating exhibition at Palazzo Grassi o, a retrospective of the work of the painter Luc Tuymans. I loved these paintings which looked like out of focus photographs which gave an ethereal, wistful effect. My favourites were the ones which looked at the close detail of something such as showing a wax seal and another looking at the surface of brocade. They mirrored the way I often look at the surface and detail of paintings in in this case I ended up looking at the detail of a detail. A lot of the work was responding to 20th century German history and the current rise of right wing groups. This sometimes gave quite beautiful pictures a sinister edge such as “Walk” which looked like a slightly Lowry like scene of people walking in a park from above but turned out to be based on a photograph of Nazi dignitaries strolling around Berchtesgarden.   There are also some lovely portraits which turn out to be of Nazi leaders or a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The leaflet for ...

Confused exhibition at Punta Della Dogana in Venice of contemporary art on the theme of the inner landscape. I’m reading the leaflet again as I type and I’m still not sure what the show was about although there were some lovely works. A lot of the artists were inspired by the poet Etel Adnan but as I’m not familiar with their work that doesn’t really help me. The show was also meant to light variations of the building. Let’s just dive into what I liked! I loved Philippe Parreno’s mesmeric video installation recreating a suite at the Waldorf Astor Hotel in New York and adding her ghostly presence through recreations of her view of the room, her voice and a robot reproducing her handwriting. It was shown in a room with paintings by the aforementioned poet, Etal Adnan, and at the end of the video the light changed so you could see the pictures. A lovely effect. I liked the work shown here which were a series of greenhouses. I liked the fact that when you first viewed them...

Interesting  exhibition at the Accademia in Venice of work by Baselitz influenced by Italy and the Renaissance. Baselitiz is the first living artist to be shown at the Academia. The show is gently themed and included new work done for the space. I wasn’t sure I always got the Italian link in the work except in a small room of drawings based on Italian paintings, Although they were slightly abstracted you could see the link with the originals such as Virgin and Child by Rosso. I thought the double upside down portraits of couples, mainly the artist and his wife, looked good in the space and created interesting vistas through the rooms. They were more colourful than I remembered from a previous and it’s interesting how quickly your eye adjusts to the figures being upside down. Closed  6 October 2019

Fun series of national pavilions and collateral events at the Venice Biennale scattered around town rather than at the main two sites. We managed to get round 12 of these which, looking at the map again now, seems if a bit amateur but we did only have a week!   Highlights included New Zealand’s talking trees and Catalonia’s look at the role of public statues particularly those that have been torn down. I loved the grey people came from Azerbajan’s pavilion which looked at virtual reality and communications. But I think my favourite was a touching installation by Sean Edwards, looking at his childhood in Cardiff which included authentic Welsh quilts.  Closes 24 November 2019 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Fabulous mix of exhibition and national Pavilions at the 58th Venice Biennale showcasing contemporary art. We started by going to the Central Pavilion that showed work of a lot of the artists who had been on show in the main exhibition at the Arsenale. However here they didn’t each have their own section but the pieces were mixed together and it made you look at them in a different way and it meant you realised which artists you had particularly liked as they bubbled to the surface in this show. For me I loved the sketches by Michael Armitage   for his Kenya election pictures. We then faced the 30 national pavilions with copious coffee breaks to keep us going. So highlights were the Belgium installation Mondo Cane by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, automated life sized puppets of serial killers and miserable people. It came with a good leaflet giving you the story of each figure. Poland showed an inside out plane. It was fascinating to see so familiar object in such a...

Delightful exhibition at Palazzo Giustinian Lolin in Venice of photographs and holograms by Rossella Pezzino de Geronimo organised by Fondazione Levi.  I must admit not it’s a few weeks since I saw this I’ve forgotten the photographs although I remember finding them beautiful and there were some sweet small holograms of a butterfly. Incidentally there was a lot of use of holograms at the Biennale so I think they could become a big thing. The piece I loved though was a lovely video installation shown on a portrait shaped full length screen showing life sized dancers. I found it mesmeric and so gentle. A lovely haven of calm amongst a lot of frantic and ‘meaningful’ exhibitions. Closed 5 October 2019

Disappointing yet beautiful exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice telling the story of Mario Fortuny Y Madrazo, the fashion designer, and his father, the artist, Mario Fortuny Y Marsal. I say disappointing because there was no narrative or labels, in fact if I’d not picked up a leaflet I’d have been none the wiser to it even being an exhibition. The leaflet told you about the father and son in quite a dense way and wasn’t something you’d read as you walked round. I guess the idea was for the space to speak for itself but I’d not sure it was telling the story. However I say beautiful because the main room was set out with lots of Fortuny dresses. I’ve been to Palazzo Fortuny before a couple of times and oddly enough this is what I’d hoped it would look like. On the other occasions this original room had been shown with contemporary art but this gives the best view of what it might have looked like when Fortunty was living and working there.   I love the cut and co...

Calm exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice looking at the life and work of Korean artists Yun Hyong-keun. There was a good section on his life and how he was repeatedly imprisoned for his freedom of expression but the majority of the exhibition was given over to his art. The paintings were large abstract dark works where the dark pigment was made up of ultramarine blue and burnt umber which he explained represented the colour of sky and earth. Often areas of the canvas were left bare to give the contrasting beige tone. I thought the pieces had a feel of Rothko. The work looked beautiful in this space. Closes 24 November 2019

Dull exhibition   at Forgia Marinarezza in Venice of work by Douglas Gordon, and Florian Süssmayr organised by Arsenale Institute for Politics or Representation. The works were rather bland and there was very little explanation. I’m reading the press release which just seems to be a history of reflection and Venice role in inventing glass mirrors. All very fascinating but I’m still not sure how the art fits in. We did have a nice chat to the attendant about what it was like to sit with such depressing work in a dark space when the Grand Canal was outside. Anyway this explains why my accompanying picture is actually a view thought the window, still it does include a neon art work. Closes 24 November 2019

Vibrant exhibition at Giardini Marinaressa in Venice of sculpture on the theme of identity organised by the European Cultural Centre – Italy. The show consisted of large scale works shown in two garden spaces alongside the Grand Canal. It was a great setting for the work. Stand out pieces included Nadim Karam’s revolving work “Politics of Dialogue: The Merry-Go-Round”, seven abstract figures revolving in a conversation. I also liked Idan Zareski’s huge, blue, grumpy baby with big feet. My favourite artist, shown here, was Carole Feuerman, with wonderful hyper realistic pieces. These included this diver, a swimming, a diver doing hand stands and ballet dancers. Sadly since I got back and looked up this show I’ve realised there was more of it at Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora with work by painters, and photographers. Oh well you can’t see everything! Closes 24 November 2019

Fun installation at Fondemanta Sant’Anna 992/a in Venice by British-Korean artist Sang Woo Kim and organised by Venice Arts Projects.  We found this a couple of doors from where we were staying in Venice. From the outside it looked like a rather odd, out of place trendy shop but then we realised it was an installation. It’s fun that it was unmanned so you just wander in and experience it without other people being there. The show was puns on toilets and reimagines works by renowned artists such as Duchamp (obviously) Jeff Koons and Sarah Lucas. I’m not sure I got all the references as I was finding it too much fun and laughing out loud in places. The amusement was heightened by the recent theft of the gold toilet from Blenheim Palace. Like that piece, this installation had one working toilet, which it dared you to use. I didn’t! Reading the press release the show is about appropriation of art and authorship and I loved the line that when viewers enter the space “th...

Wonderful variety of national pavilions at the 58th Venice Biennale on the Arsenale site. My second review is looking at the national pavilions on the Arsenal site. These tend to be smaller than the main pavilions at the Giardini but contained some fascinating and beautiful work. I liked the India pavilion which focused on artists who had worked with or been inspired by Gandhi to mark 150 years since his birth. I loved a wall of painted sandals and modern murgal style paintings. I loved the Ghana pavilion whose interior was designed by the architect Sir David Adjaye in the colours of the land and featured lovely paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and El Anatsui’s hangings made of bottle tops. Also the Luxemberg offering, shown here, of note books soaked in sea water and sculpture into different shapes. I also have to mention the Malta Pavilion for Trevor Borg’s re-imagination of an archaeological site on suspended black platforms, stark white objects on   a dark ba...

Eclectic exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale showcasing curated contemporary art. OK get ready the Biennale is vast so I’m going to cover it in four posts as it seems mean to try to look at so much in one hit but if I review each pavilion and artists we’ll be here for ever! I’ml reporting things I did in Venice in the order I did them so there will be a gap between stories. Let’s start in the way I started then with the Corderie on the Arsenale site. This is the main curated section entitled “May You Live in Interesting Times” showcasing 71 contemporary artists. Don’t panic I’m just going to mention my highlights! I found the show quite cramped at first and much busier in September than I’d imagined but as you enter the taller sections the people seem to thin out or at least there is an illusion of more space. The show started well with lovely photo portraits of Calcutta street people by Soham Gupta cleverly shown with Anthony Hernandez’s photographs showing the beauty ...

Colourful exhibition at St George’s Anglican church in Venice organised by University Ca’ Foscari and Gallery Khankhalaev of work by Russian artist Zorikto Dorzhiev. Zorikto is an artist from Mongolia and the show consisted of lovely patchwork painted sculptures of men on horseback in traditional costume in bright colours set among his large bright pictures. I was lucky to see these works not just in exhibition but also to sit among them for the Sunday morning service where I had more time to contemplate them and I saw more depth in them and I came away loving the work. Closes 24 November 2019

Site-specific installation in the new department store in Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, the old centre of the German merchants in the city, by Barnaba Fornasetti and Valeria Manzi. Running throughout the store , the installation used black and white images to highlight historic aspects of the building. Women’s faces reference the portraits painted on the building’s façade by Venetian masters like Giorgione and Titian as well as the face of Lina Cavalieri, the opera singer, who famously inspired Piero Fornasetti, Barnaba’s artist father. The images of monkeys refer to a 1670 marble plaque that recalled a law of the time about the activities allowed in the building: “no obscenities or insults, no gaming, uproar or brawling. Otherwise, do business as you will” and there were hands dropping ducats with the motto engraved on the door of the office of the manager of the Fondaco. I loved the historic layers of the installation plus it looked great and pulled the space toget...

Fun installation at the Giardino Bianco Art Space in Venice by Chinese artist Shen Jingdong put on by VeniceArtFactory during the Biennale. Taking up the whole of this ground floor space the show consisted of a series of large yellow balloons with a comical faces on surrounded by paintings of children with large wide eyes evidently a characteristic style of his. You could also add to a graffiti style wall of comments. It was nice to find such a fun space as my first experience of the contemporary art around Venice while the Biennale is on. Not all shows were as cheerful as this. I’m not too sure what it meant but it made me smile. Closes 24 November 2019

Fun installation in the atrium of Fortnum and Mason’s by Liz West as part of the London Design Festival. I was away for the week of the festival so it was nice to see even just one of the many installations and exhibitions around town. This was a lovely chandelier like structure made of a frame of cubes clad in dichroic film in two colourways which gives a multi-coloured range of colours as you moved round it and the light changed. It also mirrored the surroundings giving another dimension. It made you look at this familiar space in a different way. Closed 22 September 2019

Beautiful exhibition at Fortnum and Mason’s of work by Chinese artists Zhang Enli. I always look forward to this annual show of work by contemporary artists shown around the shop and it is interesting to see what works and what doesn’t. Enli’s pictures work particularly well this year possibly because 19 of the 22 works shown were produced for this display. The works were abstract but were largely based on his travels in London and Scotland. A number of the works resembled the contours of a map and were painted on top of collaged newspapers from Shanghai. I wondered if this gave the idea of away yet at home to him. They’d have had a different feel if they had been on papers local to where he was travelling. My favourite were the ones which looked like islands. Closes 18 October 2019

Elegant pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery designed this year by Junya Ishigami. I thought this year’s Pavilion fitted beautifully in the space, respecting the trees and working well with the undulations in the land. I liked its swooping slate roof which was held up by thin steel posts. The random placing of the slates made the roof look like the sea close up and I loved the fact that it came down to the ground at either end so you could see its structure. The whole thing looked like a more substantial building from a distance but was more fragile close up. The internal space worked well to give a more open area than some years. Closed 6 October 2019 Review Times Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard

Delightful exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society of work by members of the Wilderness Art Collective, 15 contemporary artists working on or with landscape. There was a great variety of work in this small show cleverly arranged and hung to make it feel more spacious and to give each artist their own space. The works did make me think about landscape and the environment in quite a visceral way. Shown here is an installation by Louise Ann Wilson originally for Dorothy Wordsworth’s bedroom at Royal Mount which felt like an intellectual Tracey Emin “Bed”.   It shows how Dorothy used memory to transport herself into the landscape from her bed. I liked Brian Thompson’s small stratified sculptures of rivers and mountains   and Peter Geraerts stunning Arctic and Antarctic photographs with a hyperreal feel to them in their clarity. I had a fascination conversation at the end with Catalina Christensen who had a display of metal and earth pigments she had collected...

Lovely video installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum by Do Ho Suh documenting the demolition of the brutalist housing estate in E14, Robin Hood Gardens. Using time lapse photography Suh took 300 pictures in the sweep of a room and stitched the rooms together to make an animation scrolling up and around the building the half demolished building. In one section we scroll across the building and he layers video of the flats before they were vacated by the tenants who had lived in them for over 20 years giving a moving record of the lives that had been loved there. The Victoria and Albert Museum have also added a 3 storey section of the façade of the building to their collection as an example of brutalist architecture and worked with Suh on this film. I can’t wait to see how they display it. Closes 13 October 2019